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Anatomy of a Campus Coup

Teresa Sullivan, president of the University of Virginia.Credit
Eric Ogden for The New York Times

On a languorous Sunday in June, low season on the campus of the University of Virginia, Prof. Larry Sabato opened a perplexing e-mail. “My instant reaction,” he said, “was that I thought we’d been hacked.” The message, sent to the entire university, announced the resignation of the university’s president, Teresa Sullivan, obliquely citing a “philosophical difference of opinion” with the institution’s governing board. Sullivan had held the job for just two years, without any scandal, and Sabato couldn’t believe she had been pushed aside with so little evident justification. “I said that if this was true,” he recalled, “this was going to be a P.R. disaster of national proportions.”

Sabato is accustomed to offering predictions — a prodigiously quotable political scientist, he maintains a Web site called Sabato’s Crystal Ball. And his opinions carry serious weight around UVA, an institution he has been immersed in since his undergraduate days in the 1970s, when he served as president of the Student Council. Sabato called around and discovered that the school’s deans had learned of the resignation just that morning at a meeting in which Helen Dragas, the real estate developer who led UVA’s board, warned that the university faced an “existential threat.”

The professional educators who ran UVA were well aware that public universities everywhere were enduring a crisis. State governments have been slashing funding, driving per-student spending to historic lows, forcing schools to raise tuition, while controlling costs through salary freezes and other austerity measures. Founded and designed by Thomas Jefferson and renowned as one of the country’s finest state institutions, the University of Virginia is better off than most of its counterparts: it fears mediocrity, not insolvency. But along with other elite public universities, it is struggling to figure out how to continue providing a premium education with less government support.

If anyone appeared equipped to manage the situation, it was Sullivan: she had come to Virginia after excelling in administrative positions at the University of Texas and the University of Michigan. “Everybody had the same reaction,” Sabato told me. “First, shock, and then a sneaking suspicion that there had to be something else.” That afternoon, in the 90-degree heat, Sabato looked on as Dragas gave an outdoor news conference. She promised to replace Sullivan with “a bold, strategic, visionary leader” but refused to answer when asked for the reasons behind Sullivan’s departure.

Hours later, Sabato reached Dragas by phone. She justified the board’s drastic action by arguing that Virginia was falling behind competitors, like Harvard and Stanford, especially in the development of online courses, a potentially transformative innovation. The conversation was agreeable, but privately, Sabato still wasn’t convinced that the move was warranted. That evening, he crossed Jefferson’s magnificent central lawn to join a dispirited group on the balcony of a university official’s home. Sullivan was there, along with her husband, a law professor. Everyone was dumbfounded. Sullivan said she had no warning her job was in jeopardy.

Over the course of many drinks, the mood shifted from bafflement to outrage and finally to talk of rebellion. Someone raised the question: Could the board’s decision be overturned? “We went around the group,” Sabato says, “and every single one of us said, ‘Nah, it’s a done deal.’ ”

On this occasion, though, Sabato’s crystal ball was wrong. Over the course of the next two weeks, the slumbering college town of Charlottesville awoke in protests, as students and faculty condemned what they saw as a coup. “This moment of terror came across everyone at UVA,” said one professor, who underscored the point by requesting anonymity. “If they can do it to the president, they can do it to anybody.”

Conspiracy theories abounded: that Sullivan was deposed by a Republican governor, or good ol’ boy alumni, or a cabal of Wall Street donors. Vandals spray-painted the six columns of the school’s neoclassical Rotunda with the letters “G-R-E-E-E-D.” The national news media seized onto the story, which seemed to dramatize a broader conflict between big money and public education. The conservative editorial page of The Wall Street Journal accused the protesting faculty of trying to create “an academic Green Zone separated from economic reality,” while liberal publications held up Sullivan as a symbol of a beleaguered egalitarian ideal.

Hunter Rawlings, the chief executive of the Association of American Universities, calls Sullivan’s forced resignation the “most egregious” case of boardroom intrigue he has ever witnessed. But the situation was not unique. “There was once a consensus in America that higher education was a public good,” Rawlings says. “What is new now, and radically different, is that after five, six, seven years in reductions in state funding for higher education, the whole system is under stress.” He notes that the leaders of a dozen or so other state institutions, including those in Oregon, Wisconsin and Illinois, have recently departed under similar pressure. “It’s just one after another, after another,” he says.

The drama at Virginia, however, was set apart by a stunning reversal. At an emotional meeting in late June, the Board of Visitors, the politically appointed body that oversees the university, bowed to criticism and reinstated Sullivan. Even then, though, Dragas refused to shed much further light on her actions. In ambiguous triumph, Sullivan was restored to her office, which is where I met her in early August, at a large table surrounded by university memorabilia and a shelf of books related to her discipline, sociology. The president wore the school’s colors — blue suit, orange blouse — and spoke cautiously when I asked her the question that had everyone speculating all summer: Why was she pushed out?

“We’ve had that conversation around this table many times,” Wood added. “We don’t get it.”

Virginia is a place of many stately traditions; as one faculty member joked, people there refer to “Mr. Jefferson” as if he had just left the room. Students are governed by a 19th-century honor code, and campus buildings are tagged with esoteric graffiti left by the school’s many secret societies. These old-fashioned ideals — honor and discretion — contribute to the reticence surrounding Sullivan’s ouster, along with more mundane issues of contractual legalities, politics and embarrassment.

For months, news organizations — from The Washington Post to the student-run Cavalier Daily — have been poring over records obtained through the state’s Freedom of Information Act, including thousands of pages of internal e-mail correspondence. The documents reveal something of the university’s state of mind in the months leading up to the crisis, as administrators feuded over budgets and discontent spread among board members. But they are, by nature, a fragmentary record: the actors were loath to put their true feelings in writing then, nor were they eager to discuss them with reporters now. Few of those directly involved were eager to talk to me, but many did speak, allowing me to piece together a fuller account of the puzzling affair. As it turns out, a “philosophical difference” wasn’t just a euphemism: it was an apt description of a clash between two fundamentally different theories of leadership.

The first salient fact about Teresa Sullivan is that she does not look like any of the school’s previous presidents, who were all men and mostly native Virginians. To a remarkable degree, they preserved the school’s provincial character: it currently has around 14,000 undergraduates, 70 percent from within Virginia, and in-state tuition has remained affordable, around $12,000 a year, less than a third than that of an Ivy League school.

Yet it has been clear for years that the university faced challenges in maintaining its elite identity. When John Casteen, Sullivan’s predecessor, took office in 1990, the state government provided about a quarter of the university’s budget. By the time he left, 20 years later, the proportion had dwindled to less than 7 percent. Casteen addressed the gap by fund-raising, tapping a devoted alumni network to expand the school’s endowment almost tenfold, to $4.6 billion, during his tenure.

Even so, it was clear that the school couldn’t rely on charity to fill the budgetary gap. The recession made wealthy alumni less generous and drove down middle-class incomes, putting stress on financial-aid programs. In a farewell letter in 2010, Casteen suggested that the university might need to increase its revenues not only by raising tuition but also by expanding enrollment — a heretical proposal at a school defined by its relatively cozy atmosphere.

Casteen was a Virginian who held three UVA degrees. Sullivan, though, was an outsider: raised in Arkansas and Mississippi and educated in the Midwest. This counted against her with some alumni, but all that mattered to faculty members was her sterling academic reputation. She was previously Michigan’s provost, a prestigious No. 2 position, and before going into administration, she did pioneering sociological research at the University of Texas, co-writing books on middle-class debt with her colleagues Jay L. Westbrook and Elizabeth Warren, who has since become a liberal icon.

Sullivan was a demographer by training, a numbers cruncher. In Michigan, a state with severe fiscal woes, she dealt with constricted budgets. That experience was prominent among the factors that appealed to the search committee led by John Wynne, a retired media executive who was then rector — UVA-speak for “chairman” — of the Board of Visitors. Westbrook, still a close friend of Sullivan’s, says she told him the board chose her because it wanted “someone who could be hardheaded and put on a green eyeshade.”

Mark G. Yudof, president of the University of California system, was a mentor to Sullivan when he was chancellor at Texas, and he recognized the challenges she faced. “Presidents are under a lot of pressure,” he says, “to figure out how to get more for the buck without compromising quality or riling the faculty.” His system, which includes Berkeley and U.C.L.A., has been forced to raise tuition, increase class sizes and furlough professors. But just as vexing, he says, is a deeper uncertainty about whether the nature of the problem is situational, and thus likely to improve with the economy, or systemic.

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Teresa Sullivan addressing incoming freshmen in August.Credit
Harf Zimmermann for The New York Times

“Some people think we’ve still got it right, and we just need to persevere,” Yudof said. “Other people say we really need a radical change in the game plan.”

Sullivan is firmly in the perseverance camp. “I think that if you look at the higher-education landscape,” Sullivan told me, “generally there is a pervasive sense of crisis.” But the way Sullivan sees it, Virginia still ranks as one of the best public universities in the country. It suffers only by comparison to the elite private schools, which can — and do — continually raise their tuition. That avenue is currently closed to Virginia, because state politicians have resisted tuition hikes as well as admitting a greater proportion of out-of-state students, who pay higher, nonsubsidized fees. (Outsiders, for instance, make up around 35 percent of the more than 40,000 students at the University of Michigan, and the school’s president is aiming to increase the proportion.) Sullivan herself rejected the option of increasing revenue by greatly expanding the student body. “The alumni and student body believe there is huge value in the relatively small size,” Sullivan said. So instead, she economized and retrenched. She hired a consultant to study the university hospital’s finances, nearly half of its $2.5 billion budget. As a demographer, Sullivan looked at her personnel and saw a population of baby boomers, as many as half of whom will reach retirement age by 2020. “Technically,” Sullivan said, “it’s a cohort succession problem.”

If she took a cautious and technocratic approach, it was because Sullivan knew the overarching issue — deciding how to divide the shrinking pot of money — was potentially explosive. Should the university, for instance, invest in science programs, which are capital-intensive but also draw grant money, or should it bolster its areas of strength, liberal-arts departments like English and religious studies? Virginia, like most universities, operated less like a modern corporation than a feudal state, and Sullivan could not afford to antagonize its many fiefs. “She had the view that there were going to be winners and losers,” said George M. Cohen, a law professor and chairman of the faculty senate. “So she wanted to get people to understand what’s going on, and at least accept the process.”

Recognizing that she had much to learn about Virginia’s idiosyncratic culture, Sullivan attended countless faculty meetings, forums and sporting events. She taught a sociology seminar. But like most modern university presidents, Sullivan spent much of her time begging for money. A tiny sliver of rich alumni contributed most of the school’s endowment, and UVA’s fund-raising staff maintained a list of 50 “targets” capable of giving at least $10 million. Sullivan met 45 of them in person. The cultivation of such megadonors is a long — sometimes lifelong — process, and it requires more than flattery: for their money, the university’s benefactors wanted a say in its future.

One of Sullivan’s most promising targets was Paul Tudor Jones, a Virginia alumnus, billionaire hedge-fund manager and philanthropist. Though he had given away countless millions, Jones considered his brain to be his primary asset: he was fond of saying that “intellectual capital will always trump financial capital.” He had already given large sums to his alma mater, and he told Sullivan that he and his wife had an exciting new idea: endowing a center for yoga.

“I thought, Oh, man, people are going to be very cynical about this,” recalls Bob Sweeney, UVA’s fund-raising chief. So Sullivan convened a dinner at her home with professors of religion, medicine and other disciplines. “I said, ‘O.K., let us think about it a little bit,’ ” she said. “We began talking about, wait a minute, it’s not just yoga.” The group swiftly produced a proposal for a multidisciplinary Contemplative Sciences Center, which was vetted by Jones’s paid yoga consultant. In April, Sullivan announced the $15 million gift, one of the largest of her tenure.

Despite this and other successes, though, Sullivan was not considered an inspirational figure. “This is not a president,” says one professor, “who was hired for the vision thing.” Unlike her predecessors, Sullivan had no talent for Jeffersonian oration; she spoke the dry language of nonprofit administration. The budgetary reform dragged, in part because Sullivan hired a provost and a chief operating officer who couldn’t get along. Despite meeting after meeting, it was unclear whether Sullivan’s proc­ess was leading to a resolution. Sullivan has called herself an “incrementalist,” but even some supporters wondered whether her talk of consensus masked a deeper dysfunction.

“You get the buy-in from stakeholders before you move forward,” Sullivan says in her defense. “When I came here, I was warned that this was an institution steeped in tradition. People love the tradition, and they would not react well to sudden change.”

A higher authority, though, was beginning to lose patience.

The Board of Visitors is an archaic body, a vestige of Jefferson’s original conception of his university as an “academical village,” governing itself without executive authority. It was not until the early 20th century that the university bowed to practicality and hired a president. Though the board’s influence over the school has waned since then, a seat on it remains one of the most prestigious gifts a governor can bestow on a Virginian. Democrats and Republicans alike tend to allot the seats to major campaign contributors.

The board that was judging Sullivan’s performance included lawyers, developers, a coal-mining executive and a beer distributor, but no voting member had an education background. Because of rapid turnover in the wake of the election of Gov. Bob McDonnell, a Republican, it included only four members of the search committee that picked Sullivan two years before. One of them was Helen Dragas, but she seemed less than enthusiastic about the choice. “Helen’s comments indicated that she somehow had it in her mind that Terry was more of an administrator than a leader,” says Austin Ligon, a businessman who was on the search committee.

“I gave her my vote of confidence at her election, and worked diligently to support both her presidency and the mission of the institution,” Dragas told me by phone in late August. “There just came a time when the two objectives seemed contradictory, and I acted in the best interests of the students.” Sharp-featured and intense, Dragas holds a bachelor’s degree and an M.B.A. from UVA. Her own business experience is in the Virginia Beach real estate firm founded by her father, George, a hard-driving child of Greek immigrants. By all accounts, Dragas inherited much from her father, who himself headed the board of a university, Old Dominion, some two decades earlier. “If a president can’t do it,” he once said, “we either have to work with him — or replace him.”

Helen Dragas saw her father put that blunt philosophy to work, when he hired James Koch as Old Dominion’s president. “I followed an individual who was fired using very much the same model that occurred at UVA,” Koch, who is now retired, told me. Koch went on to a successful tenure, becoming a national authority on presidential leadership, and he says he discussed the dispute over Sullivan’s resignation with several UVA board members, including Dragas. “They looked around and they said, ‘There’s a revolution going on in higher education,’ ” Koch says. “They thought that the people in Charlottesville were not responding.”

What had the board so worried? In late May, as she prepared to remove Sullivan, Dragas e-mailed a board colleague a link to a Wall Street Journal column, beneath the subject line: “Why we can’t afford to wait.” The article described a joint venture that offers free, open online courses. In the last year, Harvard, Stanford, M.I.T. and other elite schools have moved aggressively into this arena, drawing significant global audiences, if no actual revenue. While many veteran professors roll their eyes at predictions that online learning will transform the structure of universities, to certain segments of the donor community — the Wall Street and Aspen Institute types — higher education looks like another hidebound industry awaiting creative destruction. “If you’re not talking about it,” says Jeffrey Walker, a UVA fund-raiser and a former JPMorgan financier, “what’s wrong with you?”

This discussion has been influenced by the ideas of Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and guru of “disruptive innovation,” the concept that established companies are often overtaken by upstart competitors because they are incapable of embracing new technologies. In his book “The Innovative University,” Christensen argues that higher education could go the way of America’s steel industry. Dragas told me she found Christensen’s ideas extremely compelling.

“Higher education is one of the last sectors of the economy to undergo this kind of systemic restructuring,” Dragas says. She and other board members emphasized, however, that online education was merely a proxy for a deeper concern about the pace of change in higher education. Dragas was equally worried about the hospital, which was competing for market share and facing changes in financing, and a decline in federal research funding. Some board members wanted Sullivan to reallocate resources from marginal to core needs, and while they weren’t sure how to achieve that shift, they wanted to hear exciting ideas from the president. Sullivan didn’t seem to be willing — or perhaps able — to provide them. Sullivan contends she was given contradictory instructions by Wynne, the rector who hired her, and later by Dragas. Was she supposed to be implementing the many plans the university had devised over the years, or coming up with new ones? Sullivan worked to strengthen her strategic thinking with a pair of business professors, but her dutiful efforts left some board members unimpressed. “She seemed, in a word, plodding,” R. J. Kirk, a pharmaceutical billionaire and board member, told me.

Some of Sullivan’s allies suggest, discreetly, that she didn’t fit the board’s image of a chief executive. She is in her 60s and has the fashion sense of an academic. In a personnel review process last year, Dragas, who is immaculately tailored, told Sullivan that she received comments from several board colleagues, questioning whether her wardrobe was occasionally too informal.

“I don’t know what the unprofessional dress was,” Sullivan said. “I do live here at the university, so when I’m working out or doing something else here, people will see me.” It’s hard to imagine anyone leveling such criticism at, say, the famously rumpled former Harvard president Larry Summers. “People are very much aware that I’m the first woman president of Virginia,” she said. “It would be naïve to think it’s not there as an issue.” Dragas calls the suggestion that she judged Sullivan by her appearance “ridiculous,” adding, “If the president had been a man, I would have conveyed the same sentiments from the board, no question about it.”

Sullivan declined to discuss her relationship with Dragas, other than to say that she felt it was “cordial, respectful,” until the moment it fell apart. The president was at times visibly frustrated in her interactions with the board. To a degree that administrators find remarkable, Dragas and other board members intervened in UVA’s day-to-day management, questioning everything from the cost of historic building renovations to the offering of a course entitled “GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender and Identity.”

Sometime last fall, Dragas asked Sullivan to prepare a written strategy for the university. “I’m growing increasingly nervous that others are thinking about big trends and long- term prospects for higher education delivery and funding,” Dragas wrote in April to the vice rector, Mark Kington, a hedge-fund manager. Sullivan’s response was disappointing. Brief and written in a transparently grudging tone, Sullivan’s memo warned that “we are not as excellent as our rankings imply” but offered little in the way of a coherent approach to the university’s problems.

In mid-May, Dragas received a warning from yet another quarter — a letter signed by about 450 faculty members. It complained that, after years without raises, Virginia’s faculty salaries — around $141,000 for full professors — were lagging far behind competitors’. “What was once worry about getting through economic hard times is now crystallizing into hopelessness, cynicism, resentment and anger,” the letter stated, demanding “urgent and immediate action.” Dragas says the letter read “like a desperate reach around the administration, and a cry to the board for help, and also a concrete plan.”

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Some of the key players in the firing — and subsequent reinstatement — of Teresa Sullivan.

It was around this time that she began gathering support for Sullivan’s ouster. Virginia law requires any meeting of more than two board members to be publicly announced. Dragas lobbied board members in one-on-one phone calls, a tactic that critics suggest she used to avoid scrutiny. She also briefed Governor McDonnell. (The governor’s office declined to make him available for an interview.) While many, including McDonnell, have since denied participation in the decision, at the time they said nothing that dissuaded Dragas from acting. The rector says she won the backing from 15 of the board’s 16 members.

In her back-channel conversations, Dragas also approached some key donors and alumni, including Paul Tudor Jones. Dragas told Jones that UVA needed strategic thinking, and she discussed a position for him advising the board. She disclosed that Sullivan might be on her way out, and Jones — who had some leverage as the donor of Sullivan’s largest gift — raised no objection. After thinking about the board position for a week, though, Jones decided he had too many other philanthropic commitments and recommended his neighbor in Greenwich, Conn., Peter Kiernan.

“I knew, but I wasn’t involved,” Kiernan told me recently. A silver haired ex-Goldman Sachs banker and a fund-raiser for UVA’s business school, he suggested to Dragas that he could help the university in devising big-picture priorities, its “20-, 30-, 40-year bets.” They discussed raising hundreds of millions of dollars for faculty salaries. “Mission first,” Kiernan told me. “That’s the way strategic planning ought to be.”

Kiernan said it was “absurd” to suggest, as some protesters later did, that Sullivan’s removal was a Wall Street conspiracy. “This notion that one or two or three donors could get together and topple a president,” he said, “forget whether it’s possible; it’s not even smart.” But some Sullivan supporters see a more subtle chain of causality. Ligon, a former board member and a successful entrepreneur himself — he was a founder of CarMax, a used-car chain — said he thought the board members had fallen under the influence of high-finance mentality. “Private-equity and hedge-fund guys typically come into a situation of mediocrity, where rapid change may result in a profit,” he told me. “When you’re talking about a well-established university with a strong reputation that is trying to enhance that reputation, that’s not how the game is played.”

Sullivan’s opponents on the board, by contrast, saw themselves in a courageous light. “The easiest thing for us to do as a board would have been to punt,” Kington told me. “It’s a larger issue that we’re dealing with as a society: Do you advance into the field and meet challenges, or wait for them to find you?” They looked at Sullivan, with her talk of “buy-in” and “stakeholders,” and saw a bureaucrat captive to an entrenched faculty.

On June 5, Dragas e-mailed her colleagues a “timely article,” the text of a graduation address on “failure and rescue” by the physician and writer Atul Gawande. Several replied with praise for Dragas’s leadership. Kirk wrote, “The time in which we could be deferential toward an administration that is mostly bent on the preservation of the status quo is at an end.”

“Thanks for your encouragement,” Dragas wrote back. “I expect to be bullet-ridden by Sunday.”

Dragas appears to have presumed that opposition would be fleeting. On June 8, she and Kington arrived on campus for a meeting with Sullivan and asked for her resignation, offering a generous settlement package. Sullivan agonized for a day, signed the papers, and the announcement was issued. Dragas began the process of looking for a new president. “We want this to be a liberating process,” she wrote John Simon, the university provost, the day after the resignation was announced, “so that you can act decisively on academic matters.”

The university, however, declined to greet Sullivan’s enemies as liberators. In response to an initial fusillade of criticism, Dragas brought up the letter on faculty pay, raising the prospect of increased salaries once the university recruited “a stellar new president.” Paul Tudor Jones jumped into the fray, writing a column for a Charlottesville newspaper in which he called Sullivan’s departure “a clarion call from the Board of Visitors that business as usual is not acceptable anymore. Why be good when there is outstanding to be had?”

Dragas, though, had badly misjudged the faculty. While they love to complain about their salaries, academics typically place a higher value on less quantifiable benefits, like academic freedom and the job security of the tenure system. Though they harbored no great love for Sullivan, she was still one of their own. When a financier like Jones urged them to be “elated” about the change, it only fed paranoia about the creeping influence of wealthy donors. Shortly after Sullivan’s removal, Peter Kiernan sent a mass e-mail disclosing that he had been consulted ahead of time and assuring the university that Dragas and Kington — both business-school alums — would be proceeding “with a focus on strategic dynamism.”

“I think that was the catalyst for real outrage,” Robert Fatton, a comparative government professor, says of Kiernan’s e-mail. On June 18, Sullivan gave what was intended as a farewell speech to the board, criticizing “corporate-style, top-down leadership” as a crowd of thousands gathered on the lawn to protest.

“This board comes predominantly from the corporate sector, and they were not used to dealing with people who have academic tenure and can say whatever they want,” James Koch told me. “They are used to being able to fire people who do that.”

Sullivan’s supporters established a “war room” on campus, where they organized a counterattack, focusing on influential alumni and wavering board members. The key mobilizer was Wynne, the rector who hired Sullivan. Though he no longer held any office, he still had deep connections within the university and in Virginia politics and media. “I was unaware that when he gave me the key to the Rotunda, he kept a figurative duplicate for himself,” says Dragas, who says she saw herself as the target of a group led by Wynne that was resistant to her attempts to address the university’s long-term challenges. “It mutated into a real struggle over who controlled the university.” (Wynne declined to comment.)

Dragas’s actions suggest that she originally saw the resistance as a public-relations problem. After the resignation, the board retained a high-priced communications firm to handle damage control, but Dragas issued only vague statements. The Washington Post, citing anonymous sources, reported that the board thought Sullivan “lacked the mettle” to make difficult cuts, like the elimination of the classics and German departments. Sullivan told me no such actions were ever discussed, but the story further fired up her supporters.

Governor McDonnell was on a trade mission to Europe at the time of Sullivan’s ouster, which allowed him to distance himself, but as the turmoil went on, he called on the board to resolve the issue or resign en masse. By this time, many of Dragas’s allies had deserted her. Sullivan was reinstated by a unanimous vote on June 26 and appeared on the steps of the Rotunda to address cheering supporters with an obligatory quote from Jefferson: “It is pleasant for those who have just escaped threatened shipwreck to hail one another when landed in unexpected safety.”

In the weeks since, Dragas and Sullivan issued a joint statement declaring themselves “unequivocally united in the belief that the institution’s future is brighter than ever,” but their reconciliation has been chilly at best. Sullivan’s partisans have advanced plenty of theories about hidden motivations behind her ouster, like Republican suspicion of the university’s climate-science program. But in recent weeks, many of them have begun to consider the possibility that there was actually no vast conspiracy, just a small circle of meddlers with a naïve faith in the capacities of heroic leadership. “No one wants to believe,” the media-studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan says, “that Dragas was both sincere and incompetent.”

At the height of the outcry, Dragas was flooded with angry e-mail — “Resign witch!” read one message — and she contemplated stepping down. But she held on, and Governor McDonnell recently shocked many by reappointing her to another four years on the board, though she will serve less than one more year as rector. “I am a very tenacious person,” Dragas told me. “Mr. Jefferson said it best: ‘In matters of style, swim with the current. In matters of principle, stand like a rock.’ ”

Though Dragas has given perfunctory apologies to Sullivan, she has told others that she feels her warnings of an existential crisis will be vindicated. The president is just as unwavering in her convictions. “Being an incrementalist,” Sullivan declared in June, “does not mean that I lack vision.” Though she is proceeding with online courses — soon after her reinstatement, the university announced a partnership with Coursera, a for-profit online initiative — she is doing it her way: deliberately. “I think it is important to emphasize,” she told me, “that they are experiments.” When I asked Sullivan how she intended to handle her relationship with Dragas and the board, she responded with just one word: “Carefully.”

In mid-August, Sullivan met her chastened opponents for the first time since her reinstatement, at an annual board retreat in Richmond. Terry MacTaggart, a retired university chancellor, was brought in to act as a sort of marriage counselor, conducting seminars on communication. “Let me just acknowledge one thing,” MacTaggart said. “This is an awkward environment.” MacTaggart’s efforts were hampered by the presence of reporters and news cameras. Dragas spoke rarely, her face fixed in a thoughtful rictus, as MacTaggart scribbled bullet points on an easel.

After Sullivan’s reinstatement, Dragas complimented her on the speeches she gave during the crisis — Sullivan was a leader, after all — and many board members expressed the hope that the president had emerged in a strong-enough position to tackle contentious issues like tying faculty compensation to performance. Unintentionally, the board transformed Sullivan into the thing it coveted all along: a national star. Larry Sabato, who has pictures of the protests in his living room, says, “She has the potential to be a transformational figure if she chooses — and the board lets her.”

For now, at least publicly, no one is standing in her way. On the second day of the retreat, Sullivan gave a confident speech outlining her agenda for the university. “We are not in any financial crisis,” she said, in implicit rebuke, making note of the school’s pristine bond rating. She discussed the budget, tuition increases, costs at the hospital, the shaky future of federal aid and Coursera. “We have the opportunity,” Sullivan told the board, “to combine the best of a liberal-arts college with the resources of a research university.” When the president was finished, Dragas called for questions. None of the board members ventured to open their mouths.

Andrew Rice is a contributing writer and the author of “The Teeth May Smile but the Heart Does Not Forget.”